Abuses are hard to gauge
Personnel decisions are best handled by managers who are aware of their own agency's needs, not by arbitrary state laws. But those decisions should be scrutinized carefully, on a case-by-case basis, by someone in authority.
Perhaps the employee who double dips should have to show a tangible job offer elsewhere or be able to demonstrate a performance record that makes him or her too valuable to lose. Even then, double dipping must occur within the requirements of state law.
A legislative audit released this week found evidence that some state employees, particularly in the Department of Corrections, Public Safety and Alcoholic Beverage Control, were taking advantage of loopholes in the law to retire and immediately be rehired. The law forbids such a thing unless the employee transfers to another agency, takes a six-month hiatus from his or her job or returns for less than 20 hours per week. The audit found a lot of people doing all of the above, some even landing in jobs that would be considered promotions. The law, the audit said, was intended to keep people from intentionally enriching themselves through retirement.
A major bone of contention seems to be whether double dipping saves money. State agencies may find that their own budgets are helped, but the state's retirement system certainly has to bear a cost.
This is one of those issues that seems to defy a one-size-fits-all solution. However, the audit ought to make it clear that someone should take responsibility for demonstrating that each double-dip situation truly is in the state's best interest. For example, are all 35 Corrections employees who were given this benefit since 1995 so valuable there was no other way to retain them? That seems unlikely. And yet, in some cases this may have been so.
Oversight and accountability seems called for here, not a stricter state law.
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